For those who play both low whistle and flute, what situations lend themselves more to one instrument over the other?
I’ve just started playing flute. I don’t play in sessions, but I do occasionally perform on (mainly) low whistle with a fiddler and a guitarist.
I only played flute for a while (I realised fairly quickly I was going to have problems with the posture), but I’d say it’s much nimbler and has a greater range in both tone and volume than a low whistle.
Definitely flute for sessions – I’ve both played low whistle and sat close to someone playing it in a session, and I couldn’t hear either.
In some situations, though, low whistle is uniquely beautiful. If you have amplification or the group is small enough, you’d make the choice based on which sound you want rather than practical considerations.
Even the best Low D whistles, the ones with strong low octaves, are quiet compared to a decent Irish flute played with a decent embouchure.
I’ve told the story of the small session, just me on Low D Whistle and three or four guys playing Irish flute.
When we were playing in the low octave I was inaudible.
When we were playing in the upper half of the 2nd octave, particularly High B, I was as loud as all of the flutes put together.
That’s because the physics of Low Whistles, with a fixed sound production mechanism, create a large differential between the softest notes (especially E in the low octave) and the loudest notes in the 2nd octave.
On flute, with a focused and flexible embouchure, you can play the high notes as soft as you like and the low notes as loud as you like.
As Moof says flutes are far better for session playing than Low D whistles because you can have an even volume level across the range like the other instruments do.
Your handle is Highland Piper, and as one myself I’ll mention that I used to play whistle, flute, uilleann pipes, and Highland pipes in a band, and going to flute after playing Highland pipes for a while isn’t good. It’s like the embouchure-shape needed to get a good seal around the bagpipe mouthpiece works contrary to the embouchure-shape needed to get a good flute tone.
So I would go GHB > whistle, not GHB > flute, in our arrangements.
Fun fact: I’m pretty sure it’s not so much difference in the volume as it is difference in timbre. I’ve measured low whistles with my decibel meter and found them to have as loud or louder bell notes than I can get on my Copley flute. But they don’t stand out in sessions, because they have so few overtones compared to the flute.
(Admittedly, my flute embouchure is far from perfect. But when I play flute in a session, I can easily hear myself play every note. When I play low whistle - not so much.)
For sure when I’ve tried various Low D whistles at sessions, Low D’s that I knew had about the same volume (I’d scoped them), it was interesting how some timbres sounded better in an ensemble than others.
But the volumes most fluteplayers were getting at sessions were about the volume of a good loud Low D whistle playing from around the higher notes in the low octave into the 2nd octave.
It was shocking to me, after 20 years of focusing on Low D whistle, to spend a week only playing flute, then going back to my wonderful Colin Goldie Low D. It was amazing how quiet the whistle was!
With a good embouchure you can get a lot more volume out of the bell note of a flute than a whistle, but to make it really loud you do end up mixing a lot of higher harmonics. This certainly does produce a different timbre, but it is also what allows the volume to be pumped up to the higher levels.
When playing a hard low D, I think much of the energy/volume is in the higher harmonics, but the ear nevertheless resolves the sound to a low D. If you have yet to get that hard D dialed in, and you are playing a more pure low D, without the higher harmonics, it will be a lot quieter for sure.
Certainly, but my point is that the flute sounds louder than the low whistle even when played more quietly than a low whistle.
My bell note on flute is far from perfect, but it’s decently loud, and I have no trouble hearing it in a session. But my bell note on, say, my low D Qwistle is slightly louder than I can play on my flute, but it still doesn’t stand out in a session.
The higher harmonics, I think, are what helps the flute be heard, as much as the volume.
I hadn’t thought about that Paddler, but I think you’re bang-on, that getting that “hard bottom D” on flute is like the Kaba on the Kaval, mixing in some Middle D in the timbre.
I caught myself, without realising it, narrowing my embouchure for Bottom D on flute, and probably blowing harder as well.
I just now downloaded a Decibel Meter app and spent time trying to measure each note on my Colin Goldie Low D whistle.
Cyberknight is correct, my impressions about volume, in some cases, simply weren’t true.
This is what I was getting on the Goldie Low D:
Bottom D 71
E 66
F#, G, A 78
B 83 (I hadn’t realised how much louder B was)
crossfingered C natural 82 (I thought this note was quiet)
Middle d 80
e 86 (I hadn’t realised this was the loudest note on the whistle)
f# 85
g, a 84
b 83 (this sounds like the loudest note, but isn’t)
It’s so interesting how when progressing from e up to b in the 2nd octave it sounds like the notes are steadily getting louder, when the opposite is the case.
No one could have convinced me that B and b were the same volume, but they were.
On the two “Selkie” Delrin & aluminium vertical Irish flutes, Narrow Bore and Wide Bore, I got these numbers (listed Narrow, Wide)
Bottom D 80, 83
E 83, 84
F# 83, 83
G 83, 84
A 83, 82
B 83, 83
crossfingered C natural 83, 83
Middle d 84, 84
e 85, 86
f# 84, 84
g 83, 84
a 79, 81
b 81, 84
Once again my ear was wrong: my clear perception was that the Wide Bore Selkie was considerably louder throughout the range, and especially throughout the low octave.
Before you jump to any conclusions about your ear being wrong, I’d look a bit more closely at what exactly this decibel meter is measuring, and whether it is measuring it correctly. And I’d also look into whether what it is measuring is really want you want it to measure.
Loudness is a subjective issue, in that the human ear is not equally sensitive to all frequencies. This means that a sound with a lot of power at one frequency may be less loud than a sound with less power at a different frequency. If the latter sounds louder to your ear, it is because it is louder!
Or put another way, how you perceive the sound when listening through human ears is more relevant than the number a power measuring device puts on the sound. This is especially true in the case of musical instruments. So I would be much more inclined to say that the device isn’t measuring the right parameter, than to say that my ears are wrong.
It is possible to try to weight decibel measurements in such a way that they account for the relative loudness perceived by the human ear. You can read more about this is you look up A-weighting. So, one thing I’d be curious about is whether the decibel readings from your app are A-weighted or not.
Another big open question is whether the app is even working correctly. Why are you more inclined to believe the app than your own ears?
Just as an aside, I frequently run into this kind of issue with my cycling friends. We all go on a ride together, riding exactly the same route. At the end we compare the stats on our bike computers, and invariably different people’s computers have different distances for the ride, and different amounts of elevation gain. Differences are often different by several miles, and elevation differences differ by up to 1000 ft or so.
Having spent a career as a computer science professor, and having some pretty good insights into how these bike computers work, I am not really surprised by this, and just put it down to some obvious technological and algorithmic differences between the devices.
My cycling friends generally have a different reaction. Some react with genuine surprise, and comment how they could have sworn we all rode around the same route, together in a group. Almost all of them believe their own bike computer, unquestioningly, even when they disagree, while also holding onto the idea that we did all do the same route together.
When it comes to reporting the stats of the ride, the general consensus usually seems to be to take the longest distance, and the highest amount of elevation gain, even when these two numbers come from different bike computers, and where neither of them might be your own!
I see this as a fascinating human phenomenon. In many ways, it is quite similar to a life-long professional musician concluding that his ears are wrong about the sound of his own instrument, simply because an app on his phone said so.
I don’t mean this as a criticism Pancelticpiper, nor as an argument with Cybernight’s original comments regarding timbre. I’m just quite fascinated and baffled by the level of implicit trust people have with their electronic devices and apps.
Another thing I meant to add was that the microphone in your phone also does not pick up volume equally across all frequencies. It is designed to be optimized for human speech frequencies while filtering out low and high frequencies. So if your decibel meter is running on your phone and you are using your phone’s microphone to input the sound of your instrument, you are already distorting the loudness of different notes before it even gets to the app.
What you really need is a calibrated decibel meter and a calibrated external mic, and you need to get A-weighted values, otherwise all bets are off.
Edit: Just to give an idea of the difference between decibel reading (db) and A-weighted decibel readings ( db(A) ) for a low whistle, the low D (roughly 290 hz) will read somewhere between 3 and 5 decibels too high if you use db instead of db(A), whereas the second octave B (roughly 1000 hz) will give the same reading with db or db(A). I don’t know which units you were recording, but this just gives an indication of how the results can be skewed.
You also have to consider whether the phone’s microphone driver is intentionally introducing volume compression. If you record the notes and play them back, do you hear the differences in loudness you hear live, or do they all sound about equally loud? You may be able to turn off sound pre-processing on a laptop, but not as likely on a phone.
Microphone proximity to the source affects the sensitivity differentially for bass vs treble notes. A DJ speaking very close to the microphone emphasizes the bass.
A great rabbit hole is googling matched pair XY microphones for room recording.
Thanks for the perspectives.
Part of it reminds of when a reporter asked a very experienced baseball Umpire
“How often do you make wrong calls?”
“I’ve never made a wrong call.”
“Really? In 40 years of being an Umpire you’ve never made an incorrect call?”
“Never once. Because until I make the call it isn’t anything, and as soon as I make the call, that’s what it is.”
About trusting electronic devices, yes, I’ve been spoiled by a tuning app, the Braw Tuner.
I can spend several minutes tuning a chanter by ear, and when every note sounds exactly right to my ear I can scope it on the Braw Tuner.
Guess what? The app shows every note being bang-on.
And when I hear, say, that F# is a hair flat the app shows that too.
So why not just tune the chanter by ear? Time. You can play up the scale, look at the chart the tuner created showing the exact pitch of every note, and fix all that needs fixing immediately. Most pipers don’t have good enough ears to perceive every subtlety of every note immediately, nor good enough memories to remember every nuance of every note, and will spend several times longer identifying everything that needs fixing, and to what degree.